The West has more hydrologic variability — more flood years and drought years per average year — than any other part of the country, Jay Lund, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis, and the head of the school’s Center for Watershed Sciences told ABC News.
But a study published in Science Magazine in 2020 warned that the West is exiting an unusually wet time in its history and heading toward an unusually dry time that could last years — even centuries.
Some 42% of California’s population is now under a drought emergency — every part of the state except Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday. And if some of the most prominent reservoirs in the West are any indication, residents may be in trouble. Last month, water levels in Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the country, hit historic lows — an alarming notion considering the West is largely dependent on surface water.
Neighboring Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the U.S., is seeing similar patterns. Lake Mead and Lake Powell will likely never refill to previously normal levels, John Berggren, a water policy analyst with conservation organization Western Resource Advocates, told ABC News.
“Climate change is definitely challenging the system,” Berggren said. Population growth is straining the system as well, as increasing amounts of water get diverted to more households.
If the predictions come to fruition, and the recent warm, dry trends persist in coming years, how will the West solve its water crisis?
For years, states and municipalities are already urging residents, and in some cases enacting laws, to protect the water supply. Some regions on the coast, such as Santa Barbara, California, are installing desalination plants, and other inland areas, such as the state of Arizona, are monitoring ground water supplies as major reservoirs and the Colorado River continue to see the water levels dip.
The turquoise waters of the Little Colorado River. Photo credit: Lyle Balequah/From the Earth Studio
Agriculture will be hit the hardest
Farming uses the largest chunk of water supply, accounting for 80% of consumptive water use in the U.S. and more than 90% in many Western states, according to the U.S. Department of AgricultureYour text to link…, and would likely be the first casualty if supply in the West were strained.
In Utah, up to 90% of the water used in the state goes to agriculture, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. In Arizona, a large amount of the water extracted from the Colorado River goes toward agriculture, Erinanne Saffell, acting Arizona state climatologist, told ABC News.
Overall, between 80% and 90% of the water from the Colorado River system is used for agriculture, Berggren said.
In California, about 80% of the water use goes toward irrigated farming, Lund said, but agriculture only accounts for about 5% of the economy…
Alternative solutions like desalination and groundwater aren’t always feasible
As water levels in reservoirs continue to drop, officials are also exploring other options to retrieve water.
In Arizona, groundwater is the state’s largest water supply, Saffell said. Lawmakers passed legislation in 1980 in which municipalities agreed to not overdraw the groundwater.
In the past, when there was not enough surface water and water in reservoirs, states would pump as much groundwater as needed, Cora Kammeyer, a senior researcher at the environmental research nonprofit Pacific Institute, told ABC News. But now, after turning to that solution “over and over again,” they are now seeing both surface water and groundwater shortages, she added.
Depletion of groundwater in the Southwest has been of concern for many years, especially in Arizona. Increased pumping to support population growth near Tucson and Phoenix resulted in water level declines of 300 to 500 feet in the region by the 1980s, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The installation of desalination plants, which remove mineral components from saltwater to create sources for drinking and agriculture, along the coast are for “some extreme cases,” Lund said, and with it comes “a whole host of challenges,” Berggren said.
The cost of treating seawater is about $2,000 to $3,000 an acre foot, which is about two or three times the cost of the next cheapest source, which is water conservation, such as buying water from farmers and reusing wastewater, Lund said. Relying on desalination plants would likely double a household water bill, he added.
And while the technology has been around for a while, desalination also presents environmental challenges, such as where to put the salt and sediments left over from the process, which are bad to return to the sea, because all the extra sediment and minerals essentially pollutes the natural seawater. It would also be inefficient to pump the water from the coast to more inland states such as Colorado, Berggren said…
Water management and conservation may be the strongest solutions
Water management and conservation have already proven to be the most effective tactics in maintaining water supplies in the West, experts said.
Arizona water management is well-equipped to ensure supplies to the desert community, Saffell said. The state has been at a Tier Zero level of shortage, the highest classification for a lake shortage, for the past couple of years. It decreases water allotment slightly, but Saffell expects the state to move to an unprecedented Tier One conservation level in 2022, when they will then decrease their draw rom the Colorado River by 8%.
It will be the first Tier One shortage ordered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Reclamation in lower Colorado River basin states such as Arizona, California, Nevada and some states in northern Mexico. Once Lake Mead, which supplies water to about 25 million people in the region, reaches a certain level, each state will have to extract less water, Berggren said…
With every drought in the West, officials have made improvements in water management, Lund said.
And the efforts to conserve have already made great strides in recent decades. in California, cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco are using the same amount of water, or less, as they did 30 years ago, despite substantial increases in population, Heather Cooley, director of research at the Pacific Institute, wrote in 2019.
Currently, per capita water use is 16% lower than 2013 levels, suggesting there has been some permanent behavior change by Californians since the mid-2010’s drought, California Gov. Gavin Newsom told reporters on Thursday…
Conservation mandates are imminent
Officials have already begun to lay down the law on curbing water usage, and additional restrictions are imminent, experts say.
Newsom requested that residents voluntarily use 15% less water after signing an executive order adding nine counties to the state’s drought emergency on Thursday…
On Wednesday, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown issued an executive order mandating that state agencies stop watering lawns and washing windows at state offices and facilities and to stop running fountains that don’t recirculate water. The order also bans the planting of new landscape that requires irrigation.
